IPhone Falls in Pwn2Own Hacking Contest

From PC World: A delayed flight didn't stop Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Weinmann from scoring a cool US$15,000, a brand-new iPhone and a trip to Las Vegas at the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver on Wednesday.

The security researchers developed an undisclosed attack on the iPhone's mobile Safari browser to get access to a phone and then run a program that sent the phone's SMS messages to a Web server.

It is the first fully functioning attack on an iPhone since Apple released version 2 of the device in 2008, said Charlie Miller, the hacker who is set to follow the iPhone attack with an exploit he hopes will hack into the contest's MacBook Pro (his takeaway, should he succeed: the laptop and $10,000).

Apple introduced a number of advanced security measures with iPhone 2.0, including a "sandbox" in the device's kernel that restricts what hackers can do on a compromised machine, and a cryptographic code-signing requirement that makes it harder for them to run their initial malicious payload.

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